My current research "Consumer in the Reality of the Competition Society " which deals mainly with the competition law - but also the EC consumer law - is based on an assumption that consumers do rational choices between consumer commodities after careful comparison of their features, especially their price. This rational decision-making procedure is the main incentive to promote price and other competition between traders in the same branch. One of the basic conditions for consumer´s rational decision-making procedure is, however, that consumers have in practice rather easy opportunities to collect and compare information concerning different consumer goods and services.

In practice consumers do, however, have great difficulties both in the collection and in the comparison the collected information. First of all, information has to be normally collected from every trader separately, which makes it quite time consuming and impractical. Secondly, consumer does often have problems to analyse the received information. This is usual especially concerning technical questions and it makes evaluation of products quality in practice very difficult or even impossible. Thirdly, consumer may have problems to compare the received information in order to decide which commodity is most favourable for him. Often the reason is that information is provided, and often intentionally, in a form which makes comparison in practice very difficult and time-consuming. This is typical for commodities, in which the main features of the commodity are determined by standard contract terms.